Monochrome Beats
by SaturnXK
Summary: Perfection is defined by the taste of Jack's lips against her own. – Jack/Elsa. painter!au.


image taken from www dot dreamstime dot com.

**you can think of this alternatively as: **gross half-jelsa story with too many colour metaphors, where our two main characters are either eccentric monomaniac perfectionists or starry-eyed bastards.

**inspired by:** the work of artist vincent castiglia. elsa is based a little off bbc sherlock holmes, but with none of the endearing features that we all know and love. and also i've taken an important character trait from machi, a character in the manga series _fruits basket_.

**notes:** i know nothing about art. i don't even know why this fic exists. i'm sorry for my plot bunnies, but i figure it's best to just get them out before i lose them.

**warning:** shit writing. i think there's something wrong with my head tbh.

**dedicated to:** my bby sis **spider's thread**. ima officially give you this fic hehehe because you artist.

* * *

"You can't, if you can't feel it, if it never  
Rises from the soul, and sways  
The heart of every single hearer,  
With deepest power, in simple ways.  
You'll sit forever, gluing things together  
Cooking up a stew from other's scraps,  
Blowing on a miserable fire,  
Made from your heap of dying ash.  
Let apes and children praise your art,  
If their admiration's to your taste,  
But you'll never speak from heart to heart,  
Unless it rises up from your heart's space."

– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, _Faust: First Part_

* * *

White is a shade, not a colour. White is a colour, not a shade. For Elsa, white is something that needs to be covered, to be buried underneath a myriad of azures and crimsons and deep, deep purples. White is nothing more than a blank, black is a colour is a shadow, and the world is her canvas, the moon her paintbrush.

Her opinion on this is reflected quite aggressively in her art. She's a painter by profession, artist by name. Her works are featured in prominent museums all across the city, and it's reaching around the world. A jumble of contradictory titles, streaks of mint and amber all over a gentle wash of periwinkle blue.

"It's beautiful," a woman gushes. An elderly lady who's dressed in straight cream lines and Calibri font, with lipstick that could be blood and eyes lined with kohl, as if it would make her any prettier. She squints at the signature, and claps delightedly at her husband. "It's by Elsa Queen! I should have known. Only her paintings look like this."

Elsa stands behind them, purse in one hand and a flute of champagne in the other, because she needs the alcohol if she's to last through this art gallery opening. She snorts softly, about to say something extremely impolite in the presence of very important guests, before she feels the presence of her sister at her shoulder.

"Yes, it's lovely, isn't it?" Anna gushes enthusiastically. Elsa exhales under her breath and takes a delicate sip. "In fact, Elsa Queen is right here, and she'd love to talk to you about what inspired her latest piece!"

"Miss Elsa Queen," the lady says delightedly. "What marvelous work you've done!"

There's an alcohol sigh that escapes from her lips, too quiet to be heard over the murmuring ringlets of conversation.

"Are you blind?" Elsa says loudly, perfectly smooth and clear. She idly swishes the champagne in a bubbling tornado, and then locks eyes with the lady, allowing a small sneer to curl the burgundy of her lips. "That painting on the wall? It's trash. I hate it; you can take it for free, if you want, because it's so juvenile it doesn't even deserve a price."

Anna blubbers apologies to the couple, but Elsa takes no heed. She sweeps away in a silk rustle, suddenly sick to the stomach, because everything is perfect but not, gorgeous but breathtakingly ugly, and white is indeed a colour shade that must be covered, preferably in red.

* * *

The art museum at night is a clean mixture of frosted grey and iron. The air smells like winter, with a dash of acrylic and pastel and perhaps a little bit of leather. Elsa sits beside a glass case that engulfs a bust of the museum's founder, strappy heels abandoned at her side and an empty wine bottle clutched in her fingers. She's not quite drunk, slightly tipsy, and she thinks she hears footsteps, but that can't be right, because this building isn't supposed to be open.

"Hey, are you alright?"

Elsa doesn't recognise this man, and she usually recognises most patrons who are here. He enters from a wide, gaping entrance, quite anti-climatically, to be honest. The lights are all still on, illuminating silent statues and bits of vibrant plastic and a stone carving of a woman leaning against a glass case with strappy heels at her side.

"Um, I'm Jack," says the man uncertainly, when Elsa just stares at him coldly. "Jack… Frost?"

Jack is unbelievably tall, dressed in plain pants and a dress shirt. There's a backpack slung over his shoulders, bulging at the zip with clattering things that play a platinum tune. He's carrying a half-finished canvas painting, almost as big as he is. Ivory dusts his cheeks and cornflower eyes are widened in a comical look of surprise. Elsa would have laughed at his expression, but she doesn't remember how to.

"This place is closed," Elsa says, turning away and shoving the wine bottle to the opposite wall, and it rolls like a ship might on a rough sea.

"Oh," says Jack, but he makes no effort to move. His eyes refocus to the painting behind her, and his jaw drops open. "Are you Elsa Queen?"

"The one and only," Elsa murmurs. "Are you another fan?"

There's the sound of metal cans rattling as Jack drops his backpack onto the ground, setting the canvas gently on the timber, and he scoots over to where Elsa sits ungracefully in her cocktail dress.

"I'm not really your fan, no," Jack says very bluntly, once he's close enough so that Elsa can count the light freckles that sprinkle his face.

Elsa just stares at him, eyebrows raised, for a minute that lasts for maybe one hundred years. Jack looks back steadily, bold and blue. And then, Elsa _laughs_.

It's a bewildering sight to behold. Elsa Queen, in all her twenty-five years of living, has never once laughed this hard before. It pours from her mouth, like a wasteland waterfall, in shocking peals of hilarity that sound so out of place, it begins to echo the call of hyenas.

Jack titters nervously along with her, unsure of how to react. When Elsa finally calms down, wiping tears of mirth away, she says, "I like you. You're interesting."

"Um, thanks?" Jack tries. He then remembers his previous statement, momentarily forgotten in the sudden turn of events. "About before, I didn't mean any offence. Your paintings are striking in their own way–" Elsa rolls her eyes "–but the people in them always looks angry, and they just don't… speak to me."

"Speak to you?" Elsa questions sharply, and Jack blinks at her change in demeanour. She's harsh, almost demanding, in the way she probes him, searching for solutions that are nothing more than bundles of words.

But Elsa doesn't get her answer, because then a security guard comes along, large and rotund and utterly bored of his life, and shoos them out with a wave of his beefy hands.

* * *

"Elsa, come _on_. Your next art show is in two months, and you haven't painted anything!" Anna is almost in tears. "You have to have something up, and they're officially expecting at least twenty pieces from you, and unofficially you _know_ they want forty. You had almost a year!"

Elsa twirls her paintbrush idly in her hand, streams of French rose slicking through the air. "I can't paint."

"What do you mean you can't paint?" Anna cries. "Elsa, you're a _painter_."

"Everything I paint is… wrong," Elsa says absent-mindedly. She doesn't fully comprehend Anna stalking over to her canvases, checking her pots, touching her brushes, exclaiming that all her tools are in order, so _what's wrong with starting?_ "I don't feel like doing anything today."

Anna buries her face into her hands. "Is there _anything _that could maybe spark something?" she begs.

_No_ is halfway through her mouth, before Elsa remembers a flash of blue eyes and hair like snow. "Actually," Elsa says slowly, and Anna perks up instantly, "find me an artist called Jack Frost."

It takes nearly a day, and in that time Elsa stares at her coffee and tries to think of a name for its tone. At the end of nearly six hours, her mind is still blank, and her teaspoon is a minute hand that's gone around the mug rim approximately two thousand one hundred and seventy-nine times.

Dragged through the door in clumsy dabs of sponge comes Jack in all his un-glorified glory, in a shirt that's blotched with primary colours and a dazed sheen to his features. Anna is panting, but Elsa pushes her sister away and clamps upon Jack's wrists with fingers made of cuffs and steel.

"Come with me," Elsa orders, and without explanation, he's taken downstairs into the basement, where Elsa spends most of her time.

"Look, I don't know what I'm doing here," Jack says breathlessly, and he runs a paint-speckled hand through his hair, "but I was in the middle of something, and I have no idea how you found me, but I gotta go–"

"You," Elsa says sternly, "are going to be my new muse."

"What?"

"Be my muse," Elsa repeats impatiently.

"Why?"

"Because you're stupid," Elsa says, and she's in her own world now, hurrying back and forth, grabbing paintbrushes and a canvas and juggling buckets of paint. Jack is left standing in the middle of the activity, more than confused and slightly insulted. "You're stupid, and you're perfect. Just stay here and talk, okay?"

"Uh–"

Whisks of bean-miller pink and slate grey fly in polished ropes across the landscape, smoothes into rose quartz and sunset and the soft fingernails of a sleeping figure. Wisteria and amethyst and heliotrope dissolve into skin, jonquil and olive and ecru liquefy into strands of sunshine hair.

"What are you painting?" Jack asks cautiously, craning his neck for a better look. Elsa makes a noise of discontent and turns the canvas the other way.

"Not until I'm finished," Elsa mutters, as violet splatters her face like blood.

Jack gives up, and mindlessly picks up a small square canvas lying on the side and a brush, and begins fiddling around with a painting of his own.

It takes nearly four hours, but they finish at the same time. Elsa, in an almost savage flourish of the final stroke, and Jack with one last gentle quiver as he daubs the majorelle blue of the eye.

"Look," Elsa instructs. Her painting is of a dozing man, general enough. But as Jack keeps gawking, he can see why Elsa is considered a prodigy at her work. There is something about her style, her ferocious strokes that effortlessly blends lime into auburn, flesh into ash, in a way no other artist can replicate. It's a beautiful rendition of a section of humanity, but Jack still feels as if Elsa can do better.

"It's sort of…" Jack struggles to say it without being disrespectful, "sort of… emotionless? And sort of… mad?"

"What do you mean?" Elsa says. Jack notes with relief that she doesn't appear hurt in any way. Just curious.

"As in, like, it's kind of lifeless. Dead. It has no feeling," Jack explains. "It's beautiful, but it's cold. And he looks furious at the same time, which is kind of creepy because now he looks like a maniac."

The painting is tossed to the side, landing face down on the tiles, and Jack chokes in horror.

"It's trash, then," Elsa says quietly. She drags a hand down her face, spreading still-wet smudges of waxen green. She then catches sight of the small painting Jack was working on, and she says, "What's that?"

"Oh," Jack mumbles in embarrassment. "It's nothing; not as good as yours, of course. But I was bored and you were busy so I just painted–"

"Me," Elsa says softly, and she traces the painting with a tenderness Jack didn't know she possessed.

A portrait of Elsa, brows furrowed in concentration. Jack has painted _her_, while she was working on the dozing man. He has blurred the alabaster of her hair into the background, her hand and the paintbrush drizzling into cerise and smoldering iris. But he has captured her eyes, bringing them to life with so many shades of blue it seems so fake it's real.

"It's nice, but too many different tones," Elsa says dryly. She turns away. "Don't paint me without my permission ever again."

* * *

There is a loud cry as Elsa overturns her palette into her work, creating bulges of thick, unmixed colours into the spine of a barebacked woman.

"It's not _working_," Elsa snarls, and she flings her brush away. Jack, startled, almost falls off the stool he's sitting on, sketching a flower in his tattered notebook. She rounds to him, blazing. "You. Why aren't you talking?"

"I–" Jack says, disconcerted, withering under her rage. "I didn't know you wanted me to talk–"

"You _must_ talk. You're my muse, so talk. Talk and give me ideas. I need to paint something worthy of perfection."

"I'm sorry," Jack says meekly. Elsa shows no sign that she's heard him, only pulls a fresh canvas out of its wrapping and scrabbles for another brush.

"Talk."

"I think you're really pretty," Jack blurts out in a second of insanity caused by the pressure Elsa casts upon him. Elsa doesn't answer, only keeps on moving her fingers in wide arcs, the tip of the brush coated in a heap of tan brown. "And, um, yeah."

After a few minutes, Elsa stops and looks at Jack. "Why did you stop talking?" she asks.

Jack stammers something unintelligible, and begins chatting about the weather.

* * *

"So," Anna says slyly. "What's the deal with Jack and you?"

"Him?" Elsa looks up from tearing her toast into ten million little pieces. "There's nothing going on."

Anna giggles and takes the plate away, so that Elsa has no choice but to look at her. "Come _on_, Elsa. He's here every day, he's your muse, you can't paint without him around, how obvious can it be?"

"Not everything needs to be romanticized, Anna," Elsa criticizes quietly.

Rolling her eyes, Anna rests her hand on her cheek and says, "I know. But I'm worried about you. I think you need someone special in your life."

"I can live a life without my supposed other half, you know," Elsa says. "I don't need someone else to 'complete' me. Soul mates are just fantasies."

"Ouch, so cold." Anna feigns a heart attack. "A true ice queen, you are."

"I just want to paint," Elsa says plainly. She stands up and brushes invisible dirt from her skirt. "That's all I live for."

* * *

Staying awake for over twenty-four hours is enough to drive anyone insane. Elsa is on what Anna calls her 'sprees of exploding paint'. She's just gotten a new idea, and when she gets new ideas, she refuses to eat, drink, or sleep until that idea is out of her system. Unfortunately, it usually takes about a full day or two to pass.

Jack has been taken prisoner, and he's curled up like a large cat in the corner of the studio, sleeping off his exhaustion.

The smell of acrylic is strong, like bleached pearls of colour. Palatinate and Eton and turquoise mix into a new shade that has no name, lavender and mulberry and indigo, forest and pine and dark spring, bands across canvas, spots and curves and bends, opposites merging into one, because Elsa hates straight lines more than anything. The colours are vibrant, serene, clashing themes somehow generating the perfect ambiance, an atmosphere of suppressed calm, volatile excitement. Elsa, with her hand of genius, manages to shove all this into a painting of an alarmed woman, and the result is something she's never created before.

"Hey, wake up," Elsa snaps irritably, "this is no time to be sleeping."

Jack jerks and opens his eyes blearily. "Wha–?"

"What do you think?" Elsa asks, and her fervor is so great it scares him, and he unconsciously shrinks back.

Jack squints; Elsa hasn't turned on the lights, and only the light of the moon illuminates anything. It's a wonder she can see her canvas at all.

"That's… a lot of, um, colour," Jack says, voice cracked from sleep. "What is it, exactly?"

"A woman," Elsa says, impatiently gesturing, "and she's feeling something."

"What's she feeling?" Jack presses, fully awake now. He's watching Elsa with an intensity that's foreign to her, and she dislikes the way her stomach flips.

Elsa is at a loss for words at his question, though. "I don't know." She freezes for a second, and, once again, she growls and throws the still-wet painting to the other side of the room and stamps her foot. "I don't _know_."

The painting lands face down, and Jack hurries over to peel it off. But it's too late; the features have smeared, colours milked together. He sighs.

"Listen," Jack says gently. "Elsa, you can't keep doing this yourself. I know you're trying to put some life into your pictures, but you have to find some other way. Painting like a lunatic, starving yourself until you're finished, then getting angry after it doesn't work, isn't a very healthy option."

Elsa flinches when Jack puts a hand on her shoulder, eyes unreadable as she gazes at him.

"I wonder if my style will change if I try _warm _paint," Elsa says distractedly instead, giving no indication that she's paid any heed to his words. Jack withdraws his hand and sighs; she's always been like this, avoiding anything that might pertain to feelings. "What do you think?"

"You could give it a go," Jack shrugs, stuffing his hands into his pockets. He's tired, it's three in the morning, and he's been sleeping on a cold basement floor for two hours.

"Yes," Elsa says, and she patters away and digs through a chest. "I might."

* * *

A month passes in a manner similar to this, Jack coming in nearly every afternoon for Elsa's inspiration after teaching an art class for most of the day. Anna takes a liking to him, urging him to stay for dinner, and it settles into a routine.

"So, Jack," Anna says craftily, spearing a piece of meat with her fork and looking coyly at him. "Any girlfriends recently?"

"Nah," Jack says easily, mindlessly cutting up his own food. "Too busy; your sister's got me coming in every day, so no time."

"Why _do _you come in?" Anna asks, as if she doesn't know the answer. "I mean, it's not like she's paying you or anything, right?"

"Oh, no, of course not," Jack says, laughing almost sheepishly. "I'm just doing it as a favour as a–friend."

Anna almost glares meaningfully at Elsa, but Elsa is busy pressing her rare steak with her knife so that the juices come out in oily currents. She's lost in thought, and doesn't hear Anna calling her name five times.

"So, Elsa," Anna says, kicking her sister under the table. Elsa shoots her a scowl. "What are you painting? You never let anyone down there except Jack."

"I'm in the middle of a process," Elsa says automatically. "Jack helps speed it along. I just need to find out what's missing."

"Love," Jack says suddenly. Elsa turns to him slowly, and the look at her face is so awfully blank that Jack feels his joint seize up.

"You're right," Elsa says slowly, and her face lights up. "It needs love."

* * *

There's a prestigious art competition that Elsa submits a piece to, and Jack somehow passes into the final rounds as well. She detests these things, because art is not a race, not a contest to see whose scatters of russet are more picturesque than the other. But Anna insists, and Elsa grudgingly hands over a canvas that's bruised black and blue.

Elsa is actually a judge at this event, but she's called upon to paint a piece for general viewing, as if her work is for decoration instead of being seen as the masterpiece it truly is.

"I'm so nervous," Jack says quietly in her ear. The pair stands together in front of the paintings that have reached the finals, five pieces of work that all depict emotion in one form or other.

"Don't be," Elsa says dismissively. "These things are a waste of time."

She studies his piece, with all its informal brush strokes that gleam in gamboge and gold and flame. It's delicate, the way he paints, staying within his lines, sometimes skittering out in spots of salmon and apricot, bold black stripes of charcoal creating a huge swirl of something that Elsa doesn't quite understand.

"What emotion are you trying to portray?" she asks Jack, who's watching the head judge with almost fearful scrutiny.

"Joy," says Jack, voice mellow, tearing his eyes away, "joy, and also the undertones of envy. For example, when you're happy for your friend who got something, but you wanted that something as well."

Her brows furrow, but Elsa doesn't comment any further.

"What about yours?" Jack asks. He's curious, what made her paint in shattering blows of graphite and ebony and sweltering blue, what made her feel as if an emotion of boiling rage would be eye-catching in any way.

Elsa opens her mouth, but the words don't come out. "It's," she says lamely, and then she's struck by the notion that she _doesn't understand_. She has no idea what she's just painted; there's no emotion in her work, no nothing, and she doesn't know _why_.

Jack's work, titled something in Latin that Elsa doesn't know how to pronounce, wins first place.

"It's amazing, his style," says the head judge. He turns to Elsa with wonder shining in every crevice of his face. "He might even be better than you, Elsa!"

Elsa smiles something synthetic. "Well, there's always someone better than me. No one is ever faultless."

"Well, his art is certainly close to perfection," says the head judge, and he stands up in order to shake Jack's hand.

"Wow," says the third judge, staring at Jack's work with awe. "Unfortunately, I'm only an art auctioneer, but I would _kill_ to be able to paint like that."

"Me too," Elsa agrees with a small chuckle, and she shuffles her notes accordingly.

* * *

One night, when the stars bathe Elsa and Jack in battleship silver and gunmetal, Elsa experiences another slip in rage, actually taking a penknife and slashing through the canvas with huge, angry swings.

"Elsa," Jack begins, but when Elsa twists towards him, the expression on her face is so terrifying it stops him in his place.

"Tell me," Elsa interrupts, and there's a wild edge to her voice that prompts Jack to close his mouth, "how do you feel when you've created the perfect painting?"

The question leaves Jack speechless for a few seconds. "Uh," he falters, "I–I wouldn't know; I've never created a painting that I thought was perfect."

"But theoretically," Elsa pushes on. She waves her hand at the stands that hold partially empty frames, at the canvases that have been ripped to shreds because a tiny drop of blue had fallen onto a forever-stretching sea of orange, "what do you think you would feel?"

"To be honest," Jack begins carefully, "I don't believe in things such as perfection. As humans, everything we do, everything we _are_, is just another state of imperfection."

Elsa clicks her tongue irritably and paces around her studio. "But don't you understand? Perfection is when you get the combination of colours at exactly the ratio you want. When the clear-cut lines become blurred and peonies are swallowed by sunflowers, and grey is just another word for gray and fibres are sweep strokes across the landscape, that's when art is at its pinnacle, at its point of flawlessness."

Jack just gazes at her helplessly, and he doesn't say a word. Because, truthfully, he _doesn't_ understand, and he's left wondering just how mechanic Elsa could be, and how far she is willing to stretch to obtain her ultimate goal.

But Elsa catches his look, and then the wrath dissipates. And underneath, Jack glimpses something vulnerable and alone. Scared. "You think I'm crazy," Elsa croaks out finally. "You think… I'm crazy."

"Elsa," Jack says again, but Elsa just sinks to the ground and covers her face with her hands.

"I can't do it," Elsa almost sobs. "I'm a failure as an artist; I can't _do it_."

Jack, who had stuck himself to the wall to get out of her way, warily goes towards her after Elsa chucks the penknife to the ground. She lies in a heaped mess in the middle of a whirlwind of wrecked easels and buckets, curled into a ball and crying. It actually comforts him to see her like this, because recently she has been so caught up in her work, she's almost become a human robot.

"Hey," Jack says, and after a moment's hesitation, wraps his arms around her. Elsa stiffens, but doesn't push him away. "I think you need to take a break, okay?"

"I–can't," Elsa chokes. "All my life, my father–wanted me–to be perfect. No breaks, no games, no play, no _nothing_. Perfection. I need to be perfect. I need to create the perfect painting. For him."

Understanding dawns on Jack's features, and he hugs her tighter and says, "I get it. But you need to rest, Elsa. Really. You've barely slept for more than an hour or two."

"Okay," Elsa just says against his collarbones, eyes fluttering shut.

* * *

The next time Elsa feels the urge to paint, she almost physically holds herself back. Subtle, fragile marks with a tiny brush, placid slops of taupe, small dots of mahogany, slurs of chocolate. She's trying to paint love.

"Most people wouldn't paint love in brown," Jack says with interest as he peers over her thin shoulders. "It's a cool concept."

Elsa exhales in a breath she didn't know she had been holding. Jack's approval jolts something in her that she hasn't felt before.

"You know what I think?" Jack says with a grin. "I reckon you should change your style a little. Experiment, you know? You're always painting in colour, so why don't you try monochrome? I've noticed you never use basic white in your pictures."

"I hate white," Elsa confesses. "It's too blank. Incomplete."

Cocking his head, Jack says, "That could go either way. It might just be the most complete thing you've ever painted."

"Like love is supposed to complete you," Elsa says.

Jack just gives her a small smile, a hint of sadness in the creases of his eyes. "Yeah."

"I think I understand," Elsa hums, and then she takes a reckless leap of faith. She turns around, stretches up on her tiptoes, and kisses Jack full on the mouth.

It takes several seconds, but then he relaxes and pulls her waist close, kissing her back with an almost animalistic savagery.

Elsa smiles breathlessly up at him when they break apart. Jack tastes like perfection.

* * *

"Do you know why I hate my art?" Elsa asks abruptly, when she's leaning against Jack on the floor of her studio, vaguely drawing circles on his skin.

"Hm?" Jack murmurs sleepily at the back of her neck. "Why?"

"Because you were right," Elsa says. "It has no life. It has no emotion. My art is dead. Or angry. Like a zombie?"

"You're getting better," Jack argues softly.

"No," Elsa says. "I need one more thing. I need something alive."

"Okay," Jack says, because he's learned that once Elsa goes off on tangents, it's better to just agree to whatever she's rambling about.

"Will you help me?" Elsa turns to him, and Jack rolls his eyes.

"Of course," he says, and kisses her head.

* * *

One final time, Elsa goes off on one of her infamous crazed painting sprees. This time, though, she knows exactly what she's doing. The thing she's been missing all along has been right in front of her, and she's been too blind to notice.

It's Jack. Jack is the last puzzle piece to her elusive flawless painting. With this thought in mind, Elsa decides that her ultimate masterpiece would be in monochrome, just as he suggested earlier.

So jet turns into midnight, smoke wisps into cadet grey. Chalk fuses into eggshells, cream morphing into curving lines. Elsa had never really noticed just how beautiful the colour white is. It brings a whole new dimension to her paintings. Grey, gray, greys, grays, a polish of confusion, drops of betrayal, a wash of fear.

And finally, red. Elsa takes it from Jack, quietly steals it from him, cracking open his bones, an almost gentle cut to the neck, looks into eyes wide with horror. For the scarlet and the crimson, the new technique of painting with _warm paint_, and the result is so beautifully perfect that Elsa feels a grin breaking out on her lips, and she breathes in the scent of acrylic and canvas and blood.

* * *

_Menneskeheten_ becomes one of Elsa's most famous art openings. Artists from the world all over arrive to marvel at her work, gape over her skillfulness, and, most of all, to stare at her trophy, a painting of a man with an indescribable look on his face, one that, over time, will become one of the most studied paintings in history.

"This is the first time you've named any of your paintings," says Anna, gazing at the portrait. "Why?"

Elsa smiles at her, and for a second, she is a stranger, cold and unforgiving, but pulsing with an emotion that's so wildly out of control it's almost inhuman. Transcendent. Anna swallows, and then the illusion is gone.

"Well," Elsa says smoothly. "_Kjærlighet_. Don't you think it looks like love to you?"

Anna cocks her head. "A little. But… it kind of scares me. It smells funny, too."

"It's a new type of paint I used," Elsa says easily. "It's supposed to smell like that."

"Is that how you got the red to fade to brown like that?" Anna asks, and Elsa nods. "Huh. I've never seen anything like it before. You really are a genius."

Humming, Elsa observes the painting with lips curled up at the corners.

It's silent, and then Anna nudges her and says, "Hey, have you seen Jack around? He's disappeared, and I can't get a hold of him."

"Jack's fine," Elsa laughs, and Anna feels chills creep down her spine, and her fingers tighten around her purse. "He's gone out of town, left to do something better."

"Right," Anna says slowly, and she can't shake off the feeling that something is very, very wrong.

Elsa leaves to get drinks, and Anna is left standing in front of _Kjærlighet_, and there's something about the painting that she can't quite put a finger on. But then a buyer calls for her attention, and just before Anna turns away, she has a fleeting thought that disappears as quickly as it comes.

The man in the painting looks a lot like Jack. And the painting itself smells a little bit like blood.

* * *

author's note:

menneskeheten = norwegian for 'humanity'

kjærlighet = norwegian for 'love'

wheee first jelsa horror fic.

in case you're still confused, here's the gist of it: basically, elsa is a perfectionist with anger issues who murdered jack and painted _kjærlighet_ with his blood because she believes that he is the key to creating the perfect painting.

… omg what have i done?

i am so sorry this fic exists. (at least it's not angst?)

if it helps any, notice how elsa only uses jack's name once in this entire story, and it wasn't even in front of him? he was nothing more than a tool in her ultimate goal of creating her perfect painting, because elsa's just a coldblooded sort-of sociopath hahaha. i mean no, that's not funny. and it probably doesn't help any.

edit: 24 March 2014

omg kuro-d did fan art for this fanfic. link on profile page. i just. need to like. hug her. a lot. omg.


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